Electoral Panorama / Panorama Electoral

(Esta entrada está disponible también en español.)

The decline of Puerto Rico's voter turnout rate has accelerated following the 2008 election, but official statistics do not show the full scope of the problem.

The Commonwealth Elections Commission (CEE) reports that 1,942,931 out of 2,458,036 registered voters took part in the general election held last November 4, for a 79% voter turnout rate - a figure that not only stands 2.7% below the 81.7% that turned out to vote in the 2004 election, but also constitutes the fourth consecutive decline in turnout since 1992.

However, the CEE statistics don't take into account voting-age individuals who aren't registered, which represent a growing share of the population of Puerto Rico aged 18 years or older. In 2000 the voter registration rate - the percentage of the voting-age population registered to take part in election processes - stood at 90.1%, but this figure dropped to 85.6% in 2004, and to 82.7% in 2008. According to the 2008 population estimates released last December by the U.S. Census Bureau, Puerto Rico had 2,971,764 individuals aged 18 years or older, and therefore the voting-age population turnout rate for the 2008 election was just 65.4%, or 4.6% lower than in the 2004 election, in which the electorate that voted according to the official rolls constituted 70% of Puerto Rico's voting-age population.

In fact, the voter turnout rate for the population aged 18 years or older is not just markedly lower than the turnout figure for registered voters, but the gap separating both figures is widening, due to the collapse of the voter registration rate. Although the CEE has acknowledged that voter turnout in 2008 finished below its expectations, the agency has so far ignored the far more serious problem regarding the growing number of voting-age individuals that aren't registered; on the contrary, last September the Commission sought to present the small increase in the total number of registered voters (relative to the 2004 election) as a huge success.

Finally, it must be noted that while the turnout rate of Puerto Rico's voting-age population remains higher than that for the U.S. proper, the difference has shrunk dramatically over the course of this decade. In 2000, 74.2% of Puerto Rico's population aged 18 years or older voted in the general election, while in the United States only 51.2% turned out to vote, for a difference of twenty-three percentage points. However, 56.8% of the voting-age population took part in the U.S. 2008 general election, which is just 8.6% lower than in Puerto Rico.